Sinan Aral

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Sinan Aral

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Sinan Aral a global authority on business analytics; award-winning researcher; entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a founding partner at Manifest Capital. He was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently on the advisory boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil.

His research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, and the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor). In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40.” In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. In the same year, his article on the spread of false news online was published on the cover of Science and became the second most influential scientific publication of the year in any discipline, and his TED talk on “Protecting Truth in the Age of Misinformation,” which received over two million views in nine months, set the stage for today’s modern solutions to the misinformation crisis.

Sinan’s first book, The Hype Machine, which was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED, a 2020 Porchlight Best “Big Ideas and New Perspectives” Book Award Winner and among the Best New Technology Books and Best New Economy Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority, became an instant classic.

Sinan earned his PhD at MIT and completed his Master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and at Harvard University. You can find him on Twitter @sinanaral and on Instagram @professorsinan.

Honors

Sinan Aral honored with best paper award

Aral and Eckles win for a working paper

Aral’s efforts to address “fake news” recognized

Sinan Aral appointed to Scientific Advisory Board

Thinkers50 recognizes Aral

Aral wins Herbert Simon Award

"Fake news" research among the most discussed papers of 2018

Publications

"Digital Paywall Design: Implications for Content Demand & Subscriptions."

Aral, Sinan K., and Paramveer S. Dhillon. Management Science. Forthcoming.

"Targeting for Long Term Outcomes."

Yang, Jeremy, Dean Eckles, Paramveer Dhillon, and Sinan Aral. Management Science. Forthcoming. arXiv Preprint.

"Reducing Interference Bias in Online Marketplace Pricing Experiments."

Holtz, David, Ruben Lobel, Inessa Liskovich, and Sinan K. Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6264-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2022.

"The Engagement-Diversity Connection: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Spotify."

Holtz, David, Benjamin Carterette, Praveen Chandar, Zahra Nazari, Henriette Cramer, and Sinan K. Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6263-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2022.

"Identity Effects in Social Media."

Taylor, Sean J., Lev Muchnik, Madhav Kumar, and Sinan Aral. Nature Human Behaviour Vol. 7, (2022).

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